for people who care about the West

Cat Fight on the Border

Will homeland security concerns keep jaguars from returning to their native U.S. range? Maybe.

The vehicle Emil McCain is driving
sounds like a golf cart, but this is no golf course. The windowless
machine's oversized tires churn through the Arizona outback,
lurching over melon-sized rocks. On a steep incline, it seems as if
the contraption - a modified all-terrain vehicle - might flip
backwards onto itself. For McCain, it's just another Sunday drive.

On this relatively cool July day, he's en route to check
one of his jaguar traps. He doesn't expect to find a live jaguar.
His traps consist of infrared cameras that are sensitive to heat in
motion.

McCain is a biologist for the Borderlands Jaguar
Detection Project, which has rigged more than 40 cameras in the
rugged terrain north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Much of McCain's
time is spent making the rounds, a good deal of them on foot,
recovering images from the cameras. In its six years of operation,
the project has amassed in excess of 17,000 images of 25 different
native species.

Among them are some 75 images of jaguars,
an endangered species once thought to have been wiped out inside
the United States. That thinking changed in 1996, when mountain
lion hunters photographed two male jaguars about 100 miles apart.
One was sighted in the Baboquivari Mountains southwest of Tucson;
the other in the Peloncillo Mountains, which straddle the
Arizona-New Mexico border.

One of those hunters was Jack
Childs, a retired land surveyor who described his encounter with a
treed male jaguar in broad daylight as "life-changing." Childs and
his wife, Anna Mary, founded the borderlands jaguar project in
2001. McCain signed on in 2004.

With the aid of a couple
of volunteers, the Childses and McCain essentially comprise the
jaguar detection effort. When they aren't crisscrossing this craggy
expanse of the Coronado National Forest, they write research
papers, give lectures and craft grant proposals. The quest for
funding to keep their project alive is unending.

Nearly
all the jaguar images the project's cameras have recorded feature
one specimen. He's known as Macho B, a 125- to 150-pound felid that
has prowled these parts for more than a decade. He's been
photographed 63 times over a range that exceeds 500 square miles,
and he's triggered cameras 12 miles apart within a span of hours.
In addition to the still images, the project's remote video cameras
have recorded Macho B four times, including once when he was
observed marking his territory by spraying his urine. McCain says
the scent-marking is significant, because studies of other large
felids suggest it signifies residency.

When Macho B began
to regularly trip the remote cameras, Childs and McCain noticed a
unique spot on his right side. Jaguars' spots are called rosettes,
and researchers use them to identify individuals. The rosette in
question bore a distinct resemblance to a caricature of Pinocchio.
They compared it to photos Childs had snapped of the jaguar his
hounds had treed in 1996. The signature Pinocchio rosette confirmed
it was the same animal.

The project has images of a
second male, Macho A, but he hasn't been photographed in three
years. Macho A disappeared shortly after images of both cats turned
up four hours apart on the same camera. Macho B, apparently, was
right on Macho A's trail. Macho B is believed to be 13 or 14 years
old, perhaps twice the age of Macho A. McCain thinks Macho B's
territorial instincts led him to either kill his younger rival or
chase him out of the study area. But Macho B has more to worry
about, nowadays, than an interloping upstart. He has to deal with
the Department of Homeland Security. Expanded barriers and fencing
- under construction and planned on the international border -
threaten to sever jaguar migration routes.

McCain parks his ATV and trudges down a trickling
watercourse. His eyes are cast perpetually down, scouring
the earth for a telltale jaguar sign. He's established himself
among the carnivore cognoscenti as a gifted tracker. The crumbling
adobe that serves as his field quarters, in fact, contains a
clutter of plaster molds and transparencies of predator tracks, and
he knows well the subtle differences between the tracks left by a
jaguar and those of its much more common cousin, the puma.

His fascination with nature began as he grew up in the
small town of Gardner, Colo., where his father, Jim, is a wildlife
sculptor. McCain considers his father to be as much a naturalist as
an artist and says the tutelage he received informed a childhood of
environmental examination, with a focus on fauna.

These
days, the soft-spoken, 28-year-old McCain has particular affinities
for elk steak grilled over mesquite, broad-brimmed hats and,
especially, predators. He's into falconry (his bird is currently
with a friend in Washington state). The Colorado College grad once
spent a winter on snowshoes tracking wolves in the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan. His study of jaguars has taken him to Costa Rica and
Sonora, Mexico. He'd nearly completed his master's degree in
wildlife management from Humboldt State University when he met Jack
Childs. McCain's become so immersed in the quest to document
jaguars that his thesis (on the relationship between pumas and
their prey) remains incomplete. He's brought a contemporary ethic
to BJDP, an academic yin to the yang of Childs, a drawling
autodidact whose grasp of large cats has created a demand for his
expertise as far away as Brazil.

Along the stream, the
juniper and scrub oak that dominate the exposed slopes are joined
by Arizona ash, walnut, sycamore, thickets of wild grape. A plump
Montezuma quail flits into view and vanishes into the brush.
Intermittent pools of water, vestiges of yesterday's thunderstorm,
teem with thousands of freshly laid frog eggs. They look like tiny
crystal pearls.

The streambed descends gently into a
serpentine canyon, perhaps 75 yards from rim to rim and stretching
at least as high. The sheer walls of volcanic rock are crowned with
pustules and undulating spires - misplaced stalagmites.

McCain's camera is mounted on a tree trunk under a thick canopy.
It's aimed at a bench of flat ground that spreads away from the
watercourse.

"There's a lot of things you look at when
you set up a camera," he explains. "Previous signs of jaguars.
Other carnivores using the area. Visibility. A lot of it is the
landscape, being able to predict how a carnivore is going to travel
through. We've gotten quite good at predicting."

This
particular camera - a model marketed to help deer hunters scout for
trophy bucks - is digital. He opens the camera case, removes the
memory card and loads it into a handheld digital camera. He scrolls
through the images and names the subjects that tripped the shutter:
Coati, whitetail deer, mice, javelina, mountain lion.

"It's unbelievable how much stuff is out here," McCain says. "It's
a diverse and healthy ecosystem.

"But no jaguar this
time."

Macho B, in fact, hasn't tripped any cameras since
July 17. McCain says Macho B's routine changed early this year
after the Department of Homeland Security, in a bid to reduce
illegal immigration and drug-running, put up a lattice of retired
railroad tracks to serve as vehicle barriers. The welded iron
crosses were erected precisely where McCain had tracked Macho B
crossing the border.

McCain replaces the camera battery
and snaps the case closed. He gets down on all fours and crawls
into the camera's field. A red light blinks, indicating that the
infrared sensor is working. Satisfied that the trap is properly
set, McCain is ready to move on.

First, however, he
pauses near a bathtub-sized depression in the canyon wall. The
alcove betrays the presence of other inhabitants of this country.
Migrants have created a shrine, an ersatz diorama complete with a
crucifix, a carved wooden bull, a deer antler and a colorful
ceramic automobile. There's also a smooth river rock onto which
someone has traced a big cat paw with a Sharpie.

"Obviously left for the crazy jaguar guy," McCain says, chuckling.

For centuries, the realm McCain monitors has
served as a trade route linking Arizona's natives with
the Sea of Cortez to the southwest. The Borderlands Jaguar
Detection Project study area is riven with trails frequented by
smugglers ferrying humans and contraband into the United States.
These are not people who welcome the sight of a gringo. Some are
ruthlessly violent. "It's an interesting relationship," McCain
says. "There are guys coming through this area, carrying heavy
loads. We've run into each other on the trail."

McCain
believes the smugglers have come to know who he is and understand
that he's looking for evidence of jaguars, not illicit traffic. "We
both go to every effort possible to avoid each other," he says. "My
attitude is, 'I don't care what you're doing. Don't mind me.' "

When a camera captures the image of a smuggler or
illegal, the startled subject frequently destroys the camera.
McCain isn't happy about it - each camera set-up costs about $500 -
but he understands the reaction. "When a flash goes off, it's fight
or flight. But when I get a picture of someone on one of my
cameras, I throw it away or delete it," he says. "They pretty much
leave me alone. I have signs (posted in Spanish near his cameras)
that explain what I'm doing."

On two occasions, McCain
has discovered the remains of illegals who succumbed to the
elements. "One was a 38-year-old woman who had died of exposure the
night before," McCain says softly. "She was still beautiful, just
lying there.

But the volume of illegal crossers bodes
ill for Macho B and his kin in the U.S. The Homeland Security
Department is rushing to construct miles of fencing along the
international border, including in areas where jaguars have been
detected.

About 90 miles of fencing is slated to go up in
Arizona this year, with a total of 370 miles of pedestrian fencing
and 200 miles of new vehicle barriers to be built along the entire
U.S.-Mexico border within a year, according to Brad Benson, a
Washington, D.C., spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Benson says a seven-mile stretch of pedestrian fence at Sasabe,
near Macho B's range, will cost $31 million.

"Anything
that will keep people out definitely will keep any animals out,"
McCain says. "That means we will not have a future with jaguars in
the United States."

Although the Sasabe fence was already
under construction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not get
around to releasing a biological opinion on the project until Sept.
7. If all border-crossing corridors used by jaguars are blocked,
the document says, the 12- to 18-foot walls may result in the
extirpation of the jaguar in the United States.

But it
does not recommend stopping or delaying the project. The opinion
concludes: "The range of the jaguar within the United States is not
enough area to provide for conservation (i.e., recovery) ..." It
also contends that the jaguar's U.S. habitat "cannot be defended as
essential to the conservation of the species."

The
opinion notes that jaguars that confront the border fence could
choose to walk around it. The opinion concedes that a fence would
cause "stress" to the jaguars. "So, jaguars may walk around the
fence, but illegal aliens won't?" McCain wryly notes.

Even if the Fish and Wildlife Service were to object to the border
fencing, Homeland Security could trump any effort to derail
construction. The federal Real ID Act of 2006 allows the agency's
secretary to waive environmental laws in the name of national
security.

Worshipped as a god of power,
mystery and stealth by pre-Columbian Aztecs and Mayans,
the jaguar is exceeded in size among felids only by tigers and
lions and so is the largest wild cat in the Americas. The muscular,
low-slung predator possesses a lethally powerful jaw. In the
jungles of Central and South America, where prey is plentiful,
jaguars can weigh in at 350 pounds. Males in the arid climes of
northern Mexico and the U.S., where they prey primarily on
javelina, peak at about half that size.

Jaguars
(Panthera onca) now range from the Southwest
U.S. all the way past the Amazon Basin. But their habitat once
included a good portion of the Southwest United States. The U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service says the jaguar's historic range
stretched from California to Louisiana. Conservationists claim the
big cat's turf was much broader - as far north as Canada and as far
east as the Carolinas.

In any case, the arrival of
European settlers squeezed the cats' habitat and marked them as
threats to livestock. Government programs that employed hunters and
a lethal array of poisons hastened the demise of the jaguar and
other now-endangered species such as the grizzly, three species of
wolf and the lynx, says Michael Robinson, a conservation advocate
for the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. Although they
posed no threats to livestock, black-footed ferrets and California
condors were indirectly decimated by poisoning programs, says
Robinson, whose 2005 book, Predatory Bureaucracy: The
Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the
West, definitively plumbs the extent of the government's
92-year-old predator-control effort.

A recent study
indicated that jaguars occupy less than half of the range they
inhabited in 1900, with an estimated 10,000 jaguars believed to
survive. Fish and Wildlife acknowledged in 2006 that five
"transient male jaguars" - Macho A and Macho B included - had been
documented in the United States in the preceding decade.

McCain says the jaguar's range will no longer include the United
States if fences are built at the pace and to the extent he fears.
"Any single segment of the border fence, such as the current
seven-mile section near Sasabe, should not have devastating effects
on the jaguar by themselves," says McCain via e-mail. "However,
when combined with the resulting redirected immigrant and law
enforcement traffic into the remaining wild corridors, these
projects will have huge negative impacts on jaguars."

And, he says, fence construction is unlikely to stop. Once the
Department of Homeland Security realizes illegals are simply
skirting the new fence, the barriers may be expanded farther into
the rugged mountains bisected by the border.

"This
pattern could eventually fence the entire border and completely
partition the range of the jaguar and prevent gene flow in an
already small population," McCain says. "Since no known breeding
has occurred in the U.S. since the early 1900s, and no females have
been documented since 1963, this will be the end of naturally
occurring jaguars in the United States."

Daniel Patterson
is Southwest director and ecologist for Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility, a private group that advocates for
professionals who work for government agencies charged with
enforcing environmental laws. Patterson calls the Fish and Wildlife
opinion "very disturbing. The border walls would be a huge problem.
People have largely been celebrating the slow return of the jaguar
to Arizona and New Mexico. The political people at the Fish and
Wildlife Service seem to be willing to write the jaguar off. The
Fish and Wildlife Service once again is not enforcing the
Endangered Species Act."

Patterson, a former Bureau of
Land Management biologist who lives in Tucson, contends that morale
at Fish and Wildlife and other land and wildlife agencies is dismal
due to politicization of enforcement and ignorance of the law. But
Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Jeff Humphrey says Homeland
Security is concerned about the fate of the jaguar, noting that the
opinion lists conservation measures DHS will take to "offset" the
fence's impact on jaguars and other species. Among them is the
installation of additional cameras and sensors in areas adjacent to
the new fencing. The cameras would monitor any traffic - illegal
crossers or jaguars.

Additional "specific jaguar
conservation measures" will be developed over the next four months,
says Humphrey, adding that the government and jaguar aficionados
alike "stand to learn a lot" from fence construction. "The concern
is more than just the direct effect of that fencing, but the flow
of foot traffic around the ends of the fences and into pristine
habitat," Humphrey says. "Is the fence funneling people and
wildlife into a more confined area where there's going to be more
interaction?"

McCain and Childs say that's already
happening and is certain to worsen. After the temporary vehicle
barriers replaced a common four-strand barbed-wire fence along some
border stretches, the researchers noticed a surge in human traffic
in more remote areas spanning the boundary - areas used by Macho B.
Vegetation is trampled and the formerly pristine areas are
increasingly littered with trash and human waste. More of the
border jaguar project's cameras have been stolen or destroyed,
Childs says.

As for the mood of government biologists,
Humphrey says, "Natural resource managers are always wishing we
could do more with less. What the Endangered Species Act and
Congress charged us with is to make a determination on whether or
not a project jeopardizes a specific species. In this case, we have
a species that occurs intermittently in Arizona, but its range
extends all the way to Argentina. In our evaluation, the fence
project did not exceed the jeopardy threshold for jaguar."

Brad Benson, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border
Protection, insists that fears of uninterrupted fencing are
unfounded. "The mountain ranges where I think the jaguars are
spending most of their time are still going to be available to
them" for border crossing, Benson says.

He says the plan
is to leave more remote areas unfenced and allow new cameras and
ground radars to monitor wilder areas and identify what's coming
across. If it's people, the gadgetry will allow them to be tracked
and intercepted without necessarily sending agents and their
vehicles into environmentally sensitive areas. If it's jaguars or
other wild animals, he says, the information will be shared with
Fish and Wildlife.

Michael Robinson believes the
Fish and Wildlife Service's biological opinion on jaguars
and the border fence is laughable. "It was essentially a whitewash
of the magnitude of the impact that the wall is going to have,"
says Robinson. "It's an abdication by Fish and Wildlife. They
couldn't deny the obvious, that this thing is going to block
jaguars. But they failed to analyze it in the context of further
extension of the wall, which is clearly where they're headed.
They've said recovery is not possible in the U.S., but they've done
no studies to indicate that that's true."

The Center for
Biological Diversity has long sparred with the government over
Endangered Species Act enforcement. On Aug. 2, it filed a lawsuit
alleging the Fish and Wildlife Service has flouted the act by
refusing to designate critical habitat for the jaguar and create a
recovery plan. Critical habitat designations bar the federal
government from authorizing any activities that "adversely affect"
an endangered animal or plant.

Fish and Wildlife's
Humphrey declined to comment on the critical habitat issue, citing
the litigation. A 2006 agency news release announcing its refusal
to designate critical habitat characterized the jaguar's U.S. range
as "marginal" and a minuscule portion of its historic homeland. The
release concluded that a critical habitat designation was "not
prudent."

The jaguar was not officially listed as
endangered until 1997, after the two males were photographed in
Arizona (and after the Fish and Wildlife Service was sued over the
issue). That year, the Arizona and New Mexico game and fish
departments set up a multi-agency Jaguar Conservation Team. The
organization encompasses federal and state wildlife and
land-management agencies as well as a disparate cast of private
conservation groups, including the Borderlands Jaguar Detection
Project. The Conservation Team's stated goal is to manage the
jaguar in the U.S. and encourage habitat protection on both sides
of the border.

The Center for Biological Diversity
created a map of potential critical habitat for jaguars in New
Mexico and Arizona. The map, which Robinson says is based on the
Jaguar Conservation Team's own criteria, identifies tens of
millions of acres of suitable ground. Essentially, the shaded map
comprises about a third of both states.

"People forgot it
was a native species," Robinson says. "Now the Fish and Wildlife
Service says it can't recover the jaguar. It's a disingenuous
stance for an agency that spent so much time and so many resources
extirpating the jaguar in North America."

He cites a
memoir on file at the Smithsonian Institution in which a government
predator-control agent writes of "what I believe to be the first
jaguar taken by a Government hunter - I believe in December 1918,
following his brief detail to the Mt. Baldy region in the Santa
Rita Mountains" south of Tucson.

Robinson, whose group
has a member on the Jaguar Conservation Team's habitat
subcommittee, says the team's 1997 charter specifically pledged to
facilitate protection of jaguar habitat. "In the 10 years since,
they've coordinated the protection of exactly zero acres of jaguar
habitat," says Robinson, who derisively refers to the group as the
"Jaguar Conversation Team."

But there are divisions among
groups advocating on behalf of jaguars, and critical habitat is an
especially sore point for the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project.
McCain says a critical-habitat designation would be
counterproductive, imposing limits on land usage, including
grazing, and in the process enraging ranchers.

Ranchers
on both sides of the border are cooperating to help preserve the
jaguar, McCain says, and some have welcomed cameras on their land.
Many in Arizona have pledged not to kill a jaguar, even if one
takes or threatens their livestock. He notes that an Arizona
rancher who lost a calf to a jaguar was fully compensated from a
fund set up for that purpose. A critical habitat designation, on
the other hand, might encourage cattlemen to kill a jaguar rather
than report its presence and face more rigorous regulation of their
land or grazing allotment.

"A critical habitat
designation is going to do far more harm than good for jaguar
habitat. It makes enemies of the people you need to rely on," says
McCain, who concedes that the Center for Biological Diversity does
a good job of "keeping government agencies honest." But he
complains, "Some of these (conservation) groups have created a lot
of animosities with local people. They really want to cooperate
with local people, but it's only on their terms.

"The
habitat argument is a tool for the center to get rid of grazing in
the Southwest."

Robinson says the center abhors current
grazing practices on public lands but has no wish to abolish
grazing altogether. He does, however, believe that livestock
interests have unduly influenced the Jaguar Conservation Team. "Our
stance on grazing is that it should not preclude the presence of
any native species, that it should not pollute waterways, and it
should not cost the public any money," Robinson says. "If the
livestock industry is going to step up and meet those standards,
it's OK with us."

With its re-emergence in 1996,
the exotic jaguar became a cause
celebre in the Southwest and beyond. No fewer than five
private groups have detection or conservation projects in the
United States and northern Mexico.

Defenders of Wildlife
reports a population of 70 to 100 jaguars some 120 miles south of
the U.S. border in the mountains of Sonora, where wildlife reserves
have been established. Activists are attempting to acquire tracts
of land to create an even larger jaguar haven. This Sonoran
community of cats almost undoubtedly produced Macho A and B - along
with any other jaguars that venture into the United States.

Although the Mexican government professes a commitment to
protecting jaguars and their habitat, nearly all the concerned
conservation groups contend that jaguars are still being hunted and
killed in Mexico, primarily by landowners and livestock interests.

As the conflict over critical habitat suggests, the
proliferation of conservation groups has created tension.

McCain and Childs say media-savvy organizations such as the Center
for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife, while toiling
on noble projects, make it more difficult for the borderlands
jaguar project to garner funds needed to maintain its research.
They say their work has been appropriated in some cases, their
jaguar photos used by other groups to tantalize donors.

"The jaguar gets everyone excited," McCain says. "Everybody wants a
piece of the jaguar. The other groups have all got several people
working on the issues. They end up getting the available funding,
and it's not going for jaguar conservation."

At least,
not for the program McCain predictably sees as most vital - his. He
wants to expand the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project's camera
program to determine if Macho B has company inside the U.S. The
project's study area has monitored portions of three mountain
ranges. Based on sightings and habitat modeling, McCain believes 10
ranges in Arizona and New Mexico should be studied.

He'd
also like to fit jaguars with radio collars to better grasp their
ranges and habits. A radio collar would help identify the most
crucial habitat - including the valleys that connect the mountain
ranges. He knows Macho B traverses these lowlands, sometimes
crossing highways, because he's photographed the cat in separate
mountain ranges. "If anyone knows good jaguar habitat, it's him,"
McCain says of Macho B.

Other conservation groups,
however, have vigorously opposed a capture-and-collar effort, he
says.

Border fencing makes acceleration of the
borderlands jaguar project's photographic survey more crucial,
McCain says. "We've only surveyed 12 percent of the jaguar's
suitable habitat in Arizona," McCain says. "This is the time to
step that up."

And what's preventing that from happening?

"I need some cash and some help. This is beyond the scope
of what Jack and I can do on our own," he says. "It would take a
team of six or eight people, rather than one or two."

The
borderlands jaguar project subsists on an annual budget of about
$150,000, the lion's share spent on camera equipment. Childs notes
that funds arrive in $10,000 or $15,000 increments. He and McCain
say they'd prefer to spend their time in the field rather than
trolling for donations and grants. (Some of the fiscal difficulty
may be of the project's own making; it is not yet set up as a
nonprofit.)

Robinson of the Center for Biological
Diversity bristles at the suggestion that any group is detracting
from any other. He notes that his own organization is in a constant
scramble for funding, but has donated to others working on jaguar
conservation projects. He says he admires what the BJDP is
accomplishing. Like McCain, he wishes its camera-trap program could
be expanded. "Their photos have been a tremendous boon to the
jaguar," Robinson says.

The urgency of the fencing issue
might serve to unite the sometimes-fractious factions in the jaguar
detection and protection effort. "I'd like working with all these
groups to stop this fence," Childs says. "I'll try my hardest to
stay with the science and give real reasons why this fence is going
to be so harmful."

But even if environmental groups defy
extreme odds and successfully oppose expanded border fencing, an
inherent dissonance would abide: Should the main effort and funding
be directed toward the study and tracking of jaguars, in hopes that
more information will lead to effective conservation? Or will a
substantive return of the jaguar require a formal reintroduction
effort that has the potential to make jaguars as contentious a
subject as reintroduced wolves?

Until the Center for
Biological Diversity lawsuit is resolved, the jury considering the
question will be - almost literally - out.

In the
meantime, the fate of the jaguar in the U.S. would seem to depend
on the survival of the population in the mountains of Sonora. This
is why myriad conservation groups - among them the Northern Jaguar
Project, Sky Island Alliance, Defenders of Wildlife and Mexico's
Naturalia - are concentrating on preserving and building that
community of cats.

McCain lives in a century-old
adobe, once the hub of a working ranch, that appears to
be melting into the landscape. To the east looms the rocky rampart
of Atascosa Peak, a 6,235-foot butte topped by an old fire lookout.
Author and naturalist Edward Abbey kept watch there in the 1970s. A
concrete stock tank that serves as McCain's swimming hole has also
slaked the thirsts of desperate migrants.

McCain stays
here for free; in return, the rancher gets a watchman of sorts for
his property, a private parcel within Coronado National Forest.
McCain's only steady companion is a yellow Lab-chow mix named
Poncho. The dog, which possesses the black tongue and impressive
brow of a chow, was discovered wandering in the desert by McCain's
nearest neighbor, some 10 miles distant.

"I'm a
full-blown hermit," McCain says. "I live a pretty frugal life to do
this. I didn't earn enough to pay taxes for the past two years. But
I'd like to do this for 30 or 40 years - as long as I can."

Of all the places he's tracked predators, this is his
favorite.

"I've never fallen in love with a place like I
have here," he says. "The ecology is so specialized. It just blows
you away. Everything is alive, and there are more incredible
ecological interactions going on here than one can comprehend."

Despite countless hours traversing these canyons, he's
never beheld a jaguar in the flesh - at least not in Arizona.

McCain has, however, trapped live jaguars in Sonora,
using leg snares. He was working for another organization,
attempting to affix radio collars to the cats so their movements
could be documented. Unfortunately, he says, he lacked the proper
resources - specifically, a dart gun. He was forced to rig a
tranquilizer syringe on the end of a branch to administer the
knockout shot. One of the jaguars died in the process, he laments.
He left the project before he could track the other.

"The
mortality was completely avoidable, if we'd been properly prepared.
That was not an easy thing to deal with," McCain says.

But his confrontation with the agitated jaguar will not be
forgotten.

"Trapping a jaguar is intense," says McCain,
who has also caught mountain lions. "A trapped lion just wants to
get away. A jaguar goes away from you as far as it can, only so it
can get up more speed to charge you. They're very shy until they
have you in their space. Then they put their ears back and let you
have it."

I ask if the phantom Macho B is aware of
McCain's presence.

"I'm pretty sure he is," McCain
replies, who's been near enough to Macho B to study fresh tracks,
scat and other signs. "I've been very, very close to Macho B. I
know he's seen me. I just haven't seen him."

But there's
another reason McCain is certain the jaguar known as Macho B has
been watching. "You can sense a predator's presence," the
researcher says. "You can't deny it."